She (Kinda) Bangs

Though Last Call’s been tempted, your columnist has not used the pun “more bang for your buck” when discussing strip clubs – and for good reason. There really hasn’t been a joint worthy of the joke.

Until now. Yeah, I’ve been to all of the low-rent skin marts in town, and I’ve paid the $3 covers and drunk the $1 beers, but I’ve never seen anything like Chicas Locas, the den of iniquity in the Arlington building that once housed the naked-guy place, LaBare. The chicas at Locas are indeed a little out there. While they don’t engage in sexual activity with patrons on the floor, the dancers certainly like to, um, get chummy with their audience members.

Chicas Locas managers are to thank (or blame). They apparently know the game inside and out, and they’re dutifully and regularly exploiting the one loophole they’ve discovered: The extent to which an employee and a customer can interact depends on the employee’s “state of nudity,” referring specifically to the degree in which nipple area and buttock are exposed. (Obviously, the more clothing, the closer that dancer and patron can get.)

Chicas Locas has five stations, and, on busy nights, all five are occupied. But only one features a topless dancer. The other stations are all given over to entertainers in extremely barely-there clothing. Imagine a Juvenile video on BET late at night, and you get the picture.

Gobblin’ Market

Whadda you get when you cross spoken-word poetry with filthy mouths? No, not gangsta rap. You get “Undress Your Mind,” an open-mic poetry night that Elegance Cabaret is inaugurating tonight (Wed.). In between leg shows, patrons are invited to take the stage and make rhymes. “Undress” mastermind and club owner Darian Shanahan hopes the event becomes a weekly mainstay.

“I went to an open mic at a coffee shop in Arlington a few weeks ago,” said Clubland vet Shanahan. “I was, like, ‘Man, this is the wrong place for it.’ Some of the people in there seemed kind of offended, but I thought that it would be perfect in my cabaret.”

Yes, readers are allowed to disrobe – female readers.

The event is true to the spirit of authentic cabaret. (Once Rudy Guiliani put the kibosh on the nudie joints in Times Square in Manhattan, club owners began putting on productions of Shakespeare plays in which the actors were either scantily clad or naked, able to bump and grind, and 100 percent female.) A local police official tells Last Call that as long as the readers don’t show anything too distasteful and don’t get too crazy with one another, a little free (of clothing) verse shouldn’t cause any problems.